The same guard at the front shook his head. "That's a big negatory. We have to have an all sneaky team, or an all brawn one." There was a rumble of agreement.
Taiya sighed. "What if we send in a sneaky team and have a brawn one on standby at a rendezvous point?"
They looked at each other, then finally gave a nod of assent. "Fine then, who do we need for sneaky?"
The soldiers grinned. "We're going to have to call on Greta for that one. No one is sneakier than a spellhacker, and that techmage has always been good at trouble."
Taiya grimaced. "Now we're in for it."
CHAPTER TWELVE
Jailbreak
Alyss stared at the ceiling. The entertainment program in the room was working on overtime to try to keep her happy being stuck in this same place again after having the taste of freedom. Life on the run hadn't felt free, exactly, but it had felt like hers, her life run under her control. That was a precious thing not many people could experience.
The entertainment program was trying to comfort her, playing through scenes of other people's lives like an endless marathon of fully immersive soap operas. The images of happy people living their best lives was more torment for her than a comfort, however.
I can't handle it. The lights, the noise. Everyone standing around like their lives are happy and the world is full of peace and goodness. It isn't--it never is. The world is a stark place where thousands of people die every second of every day. Snap! A death. Snap! Another. Snap! Snap! Snap! So many dead people.
And sure, not everyone dies all the time. There's usually a few years of life sandwiched in between being born and being in a coffin. But what's the point of all those years of life, anyways? You sit. You talk. You walk. You wake up early every day to trudge through traffic that drives you nuts so you can sit in your stupid little cubicle and work for a stupid little boss and just feel how miserable and pointless your life is. And then you die.
That just sums up everything. You, me, whatever we're trying to do here, no matter how I try to escape, it doesn't really ultimately matter at all.
I tried. I tried my hardest to live a life worth living. I tried to fight for myself and what I believe in. I tried to fight for my freedom. Where did that leave me? In the same stupid little cell with the same horrible little jailer and the same stupid little dragons peeking in to my space every day to freak me out, but there's still no one to talk to. It's awful. I don't like this place, I don't like doing all this, and I don't like wasting my few years alive being a pointless waste of space, and yet here I am. I might as well be locked up in that creepy closet, still secured in my own stupid little bubble, as be in here and awake and aware and doing absolutely nothing of importance or impact on this world.
It's pointless. It's ridiculous. I absolutely refuse to budge from this spot on the floor. There's no point moving around. There's no point watching weird Daemon variety shows on the stupid TV wall. There's no point to doing absolutely anything at all, so I refuse to do one more thing today. And tomorrow, and the next day, and the next. And by the end of things, eventually if I do nothing at all, I'll probably be completely forgotten about and starve to death, but what do I care about all of that when I have no reason to eat or live or even exist at this point? There's just no reason to do anything at all so I'm just not going to bother.
She slept that day, and the next. It was hard to tell exactly how much time had passed, as even the practice courts viewed from her room were clearly a dragon-sized indoor field and had no view of sky or sun in sight, but it was easy to guess that the courts likely were lit up during the day and turned off at night. It should have been an easy task to guess the passage of time from that, but sometimes it felt like it took longer for them to be lit up; and she suspected that they likely had some days they were closed. She didn't particularly care about time or any of its concerns, but it was the one thing she had to think about or do in here so it was still something she noticed.
Most of the time, even when the courts viewed from her room were open and she could hear rumblings and activity out there, the windows still kept frosted at least so she didn't have to view the creepy creatures out there. Every now and then they would go clear and make her fully visible though. One time a dragon went so far as to stick his entire head into the cell. She tried to calmly ignore it, but then some smoke came out of its nostrils to flood the room; and she covered her head in a blanket to try to minimize the damage of smoke inhalation.
The edges of the blanket got a little singed when the dragon came too close, and it moved its claw into the room and tried to drag the still-smoldering blanket away from the girl, but she held tightly and ending up falling on the ground with it. The dragon huffed some more and batted at the embers around the girl as best it could. She just curled up more tightly within the blanket and rolled around as the claw batted the bundle back and forth until finally her visitor decided to
